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Saturday, August 18, 2012

There's a really strange bit leading off Bizarre this morning, built around a letter Nick Mason has written defending the Ed Sheeran Floyd cover at the Olympic Closing Ceremony.

Gordon thinks this is one in the eye for Floyd fans who were unimpressed:

So-called Floyd fans had even turned on Ed’s teenage fans, who thought he was playing a new song at the event.

But all the abuse looks ridiculous now that the man himself has given Ed a pat on the back for his efforts on the prog-rockers’ hit Wish You Were Here. The drummer, who performed the song with Ed, Mike Rutherford from Genesis and Richard Jones of The Feeling, has sent the Suffolk star a life-affirming letter.

In Gordon's mind, then, there are Pink Floyd fans who thought that Mason playing the song onstage, with Sheeran, wasn't any sign that he was happy for it to happen, but will accept it now there's a signed document.

Smart also has a bemusing reference to Mother Teresa:

IF Mother Teresa had been on Twitter, some halfwit would give her a hard time about having crap sandals.

So he appears to be comparing 'doing a cover song badly' with 'working tirelessly in the slums of Calcutta with the poor'; and, to be honest, I think most people would have been too busy asking the nun why she forced people to convert to Catholicism before helping them rather than worrying about sandals.

Perhaps most befuddling of all, though, is this:

Let's not even bother with the misspelling of "no" - so many people from Wapping are spending so much time with police and solicitors these days it's a miracle there's anyone left around to do any publishing at all - and just try and work out what the headline is supposed to mean. Isn't the point of the story that Mason hopes Sheeran fans will investigate the Floyd back catalogue, which would surely mean that we do need education? Or is ed-ucation meant to be taking a lesson from Ed? The pun would work, but would be meaningless.

It's all rather strange. But I bet Mother Theresa would be able to make sense of it all.

"Over the last few years, in London and doubtless beyond, a few venues have been reviving the spirit of the old folk clubs - and rehabilitating the reputation of pub gigs after years of tribute acts and ageing blues bands - with nights that are intimate, welcoming, run for love not profit and, above all, uproarious fun.

What's Cookin' is one such, a labour of love run from a variety of frills-free pubs around the no-nonsense east London suburb of Leytonstone. The music it's dedicated to - country, blues, bluegrass and old-time rock'n'roll - isn't going to grace NME, but it will win the hearts of any doubter who drops in.

The "come in for free, pay what you like" ethos hasn't stopped acts like Billy Childish, Damien Jurado, Emily Barker, Pete Molinari, the Singing Adams or the Southern Tenant Folk Union from turning up to deliver shows that are still talked about."

(If we could just have a sidebar here, the fact that a venue can be pulling in acts like Billy Childish and Pete Molinari and yet be invisible to the NME might explain some of the problems that other venerable institution is having.)

There's a petition online to save the Birkbeck To be honest it should probably have skipped the bit about John Lennon, but is still deserving of your support.

Friday, August 17, 2012

In its most recent filing the RIAA lists 72 people on the payroll compared to 117 two years earlier. In total these employees earned $12.7 million of which nearly 25% went into the pockets of the top two executives.

The top earner in the year ending March 2011 was Mitch Bainwol (CEO) with $1.75 million a year with a working week of 50 hours. Current CEO Cary Sherman (then President) came in second with $1.37 million.

I wouldn't say [I'm] bored, I would say interested because I love to get to the underbelly of why things bug people so much. People must be very at odds with the idea of being profoundly stupid. I mean, malapropisms; big fucking deal. It's kind of like in traffic when you're yelling at someone for cutting you off and you're cutting someone off too.

Hang about, Alanis, that sounds like one of those things in the song that you describe as ironic but isn't... I fear you might be making the world collapse in on itself.

“Back in my country, my president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders,” Mustaine told the crowd [at a Megadeath gig in Singapore]. “Like the 'Fast And Furious' thing down at the border and Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there and now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple."

"I don't know where I'm going to live if America keeps going the way it's going because it looks like it's turning into Nazi America."

Before we even start, let's not forget that Dave Mustaine is, like Donald Trump and many other people who would object strongly to be called racists, is a birther. Although Mustaine claims that despite pushing the line that Obama isn't American, he isn't a birther any more than he's a racist:

Megadeth guitarist Dave Mustaine said in an interview with a Canadian television show “The Hour” that he “has a lot of questions about him [President Obama], but certainly not where he was born. I know he was born somewhere else than America.”

“Well, then you’re a birther,” said host George Stroumboulopoulos, who had asked Mustaine directly whether he was one.

“No I’m not calling a question to it, I just, you know, what’s the point?” Mustaine said, who then proceeded to say that Obama had been “invisible” until he became President.

Mustaine has such a lose grip on reality, it's possible when he says Obama was invisible before he became president, he might mean that literally. It's not known if Mustaine believes that Obama has magikal powers to make himself vanish, or is in possession of some sort advanced technology cloaking device.

Seriously, if Obama had been invisible, how would people have spotted him at Jeremiah Wright's church?

So, Mustaine is in Singapore telling his fans about how America is going all Nazi-like. Singapore. A country which, according to Amnesty, "continue[s] to threaten and punish government critics, using sweeping criminal and civil defamation laws." It's a bit like going to Wisconsin and trying to tell them that your home makes a lot of cheese.

But, despite the fact Mustaine's political worldview seems to be drawn entirely from Astons shown on Fox News, let's do him the honour of taking his central challenge seriously.

[M]y president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders

The logical conclusion of this claim would be that the NRA is a front for the Democratic party - pushing for lax gun law to create a climate in which it's easy for even people like Dave Mustaine to buy guns, making these staged murders seem plausible.

If Obama wanted to bring in draconian gun laws, why would he need to stage anything? In 2010, there were 8,775 firearm murders in the US. That'd be all you really need to stand up and say 'maybe we should take some guns out the equation', right?

Maybe Mustaine thinks that Obama spent the first year of his administration setting up all those killings, right, Dave?

Still, maybe these were staged murders. So in the wake of Aurora, Obama was sweeping around calling for the Nazi-style ripping of guns from the cold, dead hearts of NRA members, was he?

"I, like most Americans, believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms," Obama told the National Urban League convention in New Orleans. "I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation. That hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage."

Obama continued: "But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals. That they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities. I believe the majority of gun owners would agree we should do everything possible to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons, and we should check someone's criminal record before they can check out a gun seller."

Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't sound especially Nazi-like.

In effect, then, Dave Mustaine believes that Obama has staged at least three mass-killings in order to enforce a draconian vague sense that perhaps background checks could be a little tighter and, you know, that perhaps it's not a good idea to let criminals own guns.

That would be on a par with staging a car crash outside a Tony Carvery so that you can surreptitiously take an extra Yorkshire Pudding from the buffet without anyone noticing.

Perhaps the last word, though, belongs to Carli Richards. She was in the cinema the night of the shooting, and has the wounds to prove it. What does she make of Mustaine's views?

“Everybody is emotional at this time and needs to blame somebody, I guess,” Richards told the gossip website. “I don't think they realize the consequences of not being responsible for your own actions and James Holmes needs to be held accountable for his, to whatever way the justice system deems fit."

Thursday, August 16, 2012

The January - June 2012 circulation figures for NME have been announced today (difficult period, what with the handover of the editor and everything). They're neither surprising nor encouraging, an average circulation of 23,924 per issue.

They were distributing 27,650 issues a week in the second half of last year; in January-June 2011, it was 29,020. That's 17.5% gone in a year.

Obviously, we'd all have been a lot happier if Captain Beaky And The Beady Eyes hadn't turned up to do an Oasis cover in the middle of the Olympic Closing Ceremony, but given it was going to happen anyway, Noel Gallagher was kind of a dick about the whole thing. Gordon's copied down the story from Danny Wallace's XFM show:

The former Oasis star only gave his blessing for a re-worked version of Wonderwall to be included at 10pm on the Friday night before the big London gig on Sunday.
[...]
[Noel said] “I took it to Friday night at 10pm before I said yes and they were s******* it. Not Beady Eye but the organisers.”

Ha ha, that will have shown Liam, erm, something, right? Never mind it's dicking round the hundreds of people trying to pull together the show. Do they give hollow gold medals for pyrrhic victories?

We are now, by the way, firmly in the bit where Noel is desperately trying to stress that he was asked, you know, but turned it down:

Noel said: “I asked who else is playing and they said, ‘I can’t tell you. You’ve got to sign a confidentiality agreement’. It’s like it’s the Iran nuclear programme or something.

Noel struggling with the concept of surprise a little, there.

The latest reason for not bothering is they wanted him to mime, apparently:

“But if you’re in a stadium with 80,000 people and you’re pretending... I said I could play live and one of the organisers said, ‘It’s a big gig’ and I was like, ‘Really? I do this for a living’.

Most of the millions who watched the event will never hear Noel's wheezy "yeah, they wanted me to do it, but I didn't" pleading, you know.

Rather than wonder if their pricing and product is correct, the record labels want to simply fudge the way the chart works to stop it being embarrassing when Rihanna is compared with, say, Ed Sheeran's sales:

But with streaming services like Spotify luring digital buyers from iTunes, record companies believe that album “plays” should be included in the charts.

How would that work, actually? There was a statistic a while back which suggested the average number of plays for each CD purchased in the US was less than one, which would suggest that the 9,000-odd physical sales should count as something less than that if plays were being considered, which doesn't make sense.

How about accepting that the album was never anything more than a side-effect of how much you could fit on a disc, and perhaps dropping the album chart altogether? Add those 9,000 sales to the single sales for each of the individual tracks?

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

A rare opportunity to purchase a luxuriously finished family home, formerly owned by John Lennon, set in about 1.5 acres of exquisite gardens within the renowned St George’s Hill Estate.

I wonder if you can?

Kenwood is situated at the heart of the exclusive St George’s Hill Estate, acknowledged as one of the UK’s premier private residential addresses. The house occupies a superb plateau position set around St George’s Hill’s renowned golf course, tennis club and leisure amenities.

No need for greed or hunger

Kenwood overlooks magnificent landscaped gardens and grounds and enjoys uninterrupted views of the Surrey Hills. At the bottom of the garden there is a wonderful addition in the form of an indoor swimming pool complex offering a heated pool, shower and changing facilities along with further sauna.

It might be hard to believe, but I'm given to understand that the NHS has failed to put A&E teams around the country on stand-by, despite Keith Lemon "guest editing" Gordon Smart's column this morning. And yet, surely, there will be an influx of split sides, right?

The idea of giving a newspaper column to a one-note comedy character, with a prepubescent interest in giggling at women's breasts in lieu of a punchline was never going to be a good idea, and look what it's resulted in: He's invited Keith Lemon to do some pieces for him.

"Had a GREAT time at the closing! I hope you are not bothered by the press reports of my scandalous 'promotion' !!!" he tweeted.

Michael later added, "Please join me in telling them to f--k off! It was my one chance on tv to thank you all for your loyalty and prayers, and I took it. And I don't regret it."

It's nice that Michael wanted to thank people for their loyalty, although if he really wanted to thank his fans, he could have played a song that they wanted to hear. Okay, the chances of him doing Wham! Rap as a thank you might have been slim - that'd be the sort of thanks appropriate if someone had donated you a kidney or something - but, c'mon, how about Everything She Wants?

There's something a bit self-aware, I suppose, at Michael thinking he might not find himself on TV again any time soon. Doesn't really balance out the belief that there's a subset of The Largest TV Audience For Years that is People Who Are Loyal To George Michael to make that the right platform, mind.

I'm not entirely sure that there's ever before been a point where 'BBC invite pitches to supply beds and jingles for Radio One programme' has ever constituted a general-interest news story before. Today it has, though. Mainly because nobody is going to have to find a rhyme for "Grimshaw":

In a document sent to music firms, the station said it was looking to commission a new theme different to previous shows.

It said the theme must "sound slickly produced and original" and feature "live instrumentation and an identifying motif (logo)".

The Radio 1 breakfast show with Nick Grimshaw begins on 24 September.

"The new breakfast show will sound young, exciting, big and confident," the document goes on.

"It needs to stand out and not sound like any previous BBC Radio 1 breakfast shows. Please steer clear of sung jingles and variants of breakfast themes and identities past and present."

Excuse me, I've got a thirty page document I have to remove all references to "Arnold the dog - but this time with lasers" from.

Now NBC is trying to explain its actions. An NBC spokesperson announced today that “As we previously announced, a special commercial free preview of ‘Animal Practice’ was scheduled towards the end of last night’s broadcast of the Olympics Closing Ceremony. Prior to the break, viewers were informed that the final act and wrap up of the Closing Ceremony would follow later that evening. “

To be fair, I suspect there must have been a few people at the BBC wondering if they should have just lobbed out Live At The Apollo in the slot it had been scheduled for...

Rather than bothering with Bizarre this morning, instead here's a quick look at a story in MediaGuardian where the fallout from scuttlebutt about Louis Walsh continues.

Last year, The Sun had to apologise to Walsh after admitting its story claiming he was being "probed" over a "sex attack" was total bollocks. It continued to unravel, as the Sun's "source" and claimed victim Leonard Watters was sent to jail.

Walsh, though, still has a burning curiosity about how the story came to be published in The Sun, and on Friday, a Judge in the Irish Republic ordered the paper to hand over all its paperwork:

The judge ruled on Friday that Walsh was entitled to all documents associated with the investigation by the newspaper's crime writer Joanne McElgunn. He also directed that the newspaper should provide all documents identifying or referring to any payments made or offered by the newspaper to Watters and statements of McElgunn's expenses.

The documentation must include the booking of a hotel room for Watters, bank statements, text messages, emails and records of phone calls.

The orders, made by Mr Justice Iarfhlaith O'Neill, also apply to The Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan, its Irish editor Michael McNiff and the editor of its Bizarre column, Gordon Smart.

Monday, August 13, 2012

While most of Britain was focusing on the terrible sound at the early part of the closing ceremony - was it awful or a kindness that Sugg's terrible voice was so hard to hear? - people over in Hyde Park were having a rotten time of a whole different stripe.

Some people got to hear the gig, but not most, as Hyde Park organisers tried to balance selling 40,000 tickets for a soundsystem turned down to serve 10,000.

Mark Beaumont is cracking on the NME blog:

Here is the news: the place is no longer fit for purpose. If you’re going to sell 40,000 tickets for an event, you HAVE to provide an event that’s capable of catering for 40,000 people, whether that’s sufficient toilets, food stalls or audible music. OK, so organisers legally have to pander to the seven-and-a-half uber-wealthy local residents who complain about the noise. Hyde Park’s sound levels are now fit for, say, 10,000-capacity events.

Of course, NME could help bring this about. They could refuse to promote, review or accept advertising from massive events at Hyde Park. Somehow I suspect they won't do that.

I keep thinking 'bits of that weren't so bad, were they?'. And then I remember Russell Brand bellowing The Beatles through a megaphone.

The most successful bit was the Slim-J-Tempah sequence, which bubbled with energy, and was stuffed with shots of athletes bouncing about and singing along. Maybe it was a bit T4 On The Beach, but better that than the large swathes of a 1984 Radio One Roadshow beamed from a sleet-skittered Grimsby that made much of the rest of the event. It felt like the party the thing was supposed to be.

But what of the rest? Muse finally disappearing behind the self-pardoy horizon was only to be expected; the Kaiser Chiefs turning up in 2012 was a bit of a surprise. If the deal was George Michael had to do the new single to be persuaded to turn up, he should have been asked to stay at home.

Emeli Sande has been rather over-promoted: she can carry a tune, but not an entire ceremony. That Kate Bush was only on tape was a bit of a disappointment.

And The Spice Girls getting together for what felt like the first time in a couple of weeks wasn't the treat it was meant to be - the slow trundling of taxis for their entry seemed to last longer than the two half-songs they trotted out.

The London theme was quite weak - a couple of cars made out of newspaper, a Michael Caine voiceover and a bit of Only Fools And Horses. Why that one TV series? Why not, say, Barbara Windsor ringing a bell crying 'that's yer lot, ain't you got 'omes to go to?'; or Cumberbutch-as-Sherlock; or Grace Brothers; or Howman and Davidson finally doing a Babes In The Wood/Up The Elephant And Round The Castle crossover. Maybe not the last one.

Hang about, I've just remembered Churchill popping out of the Big Ben bell tower like a grumpy jack-in-the-box. Oh, god.

On Twitter, there were some voices going 'why are people being cynical? Can't we be like we've been for the last fortnight?'

But that's the point. If there's a point to the Olympics, it's about celebrating the extraordinary and superlative. If you applaud Mo Farah's triumph in the same way you applaud whoever went 'we could get some supermodels in and - hey, didn't Derek Bowie do a song about Fashion?', then you're really just watering down praise for Farah.

Not everyone at the Olympics gets a gold medal; in fact, that's the kind of point. Doing a closing ceremony is always going to be a thankless task - who wants to be the guy ushering in the hangover? - and coming in the wake of the opening extravanganza set the bar at a pole-vault height for a high-jump event. But nobody made anyone start a parade of plodding would-be secular hymns. No event will thrive when it drags on the film of Lennon doing Imagine, the national anthem of the Independent State Of Hypocrisy.

There were bits that were pretty good - the phoenix; the all-too-brief visit of The Pet Shop Boys. There was an exciting one hour event struggling to fight out of a three hour one.

Speaking on my Xfm show, Serge said: “Danny, what were you thinking? We’ve got a song called Fire and there’s a massive cauldron being set alight – it would have been perfect. I’ve enjoyed every second of the Olympics though, even the archery."

Given how... shall we say inclusive?... the closing ceremony was, I guess the surprise is that they didn't join the massive plodathon there.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

As if the story of Marilyn Manson writing Fuck on his face because otherwise people might not give him a second glance ("to stop his photo being taken") wasn't hilarious enough, now some images have turned up which shows what a hapless job he made of this simple task:

I'm starting to think what happened was he fell asleep at a party, and the "I'm doing it to mess with the paparazzi" story is just a coverstory. Lucky your friends with Sharpies didn't just go with the usual cock and balls, eh, Mazza?

[There's a whole bunch of pictures by Lindsay Usich over at Zimbio.com]

The song list looks promising, and I find myself leaning towards Babes In Toyland. But then I think again. My not-good-enough brain kicks in. And maybe it’s ironic that I’ve fashioned myself into a vocalist (because who else is going to sing my songs?) afraid to sing karaoke. My not-good-enough brain knows that delivery is very important, and Babes In Toyland is a band with complex rhythms and strong dynamics. My not-good-enough brain tells me that I don’t really know the words to any of the songs. I don’t have confidence about singing them with a live band. My not-good-enough brain has also learned that each song would only be performed once that night. It says,”Erika, what if I get up there and ruin someone’s favorite song?” I don’t want to do that. “No,” I decide, “I won’t sing. I’ll watch how it works and maybe I’ll sing next time.”

It’s funny how I always feel so alone in my lack of confidence only to be confronted with others who seem self-assured, but struggle with the same thing. This lack of confidence, this “not-good-enough” thinking, is one of the hurdles that Riot Grrrl Karaoke seeks to demolish.

Apparently, David Cameron was down the Olympic Park on Thursday. Of course he was; he hasn't done a hand's turn for the last fortnight, instead choosing to try and photobomb the Olympics in a scratchy Team GB vest, clutching a Wenlock.

We know how much the Tories hate any hint of the bias at the BBC, and yet they seem surprisingly relaxed about this, despite it being a breach of guidelines. MediaGuardian explains:

The BBC has strict guidelines governing the appearance of politicians on non-news programmes, which require senior executive approval, as well as topical issues that are the subject of public debate.

Such is the level of sensitivity over the interview that the BBC is believed to have discussed internally whether to remove it from the iPlayer. It remained available at the time of publication.

"Nobody knew anything until it was too late to do anything about it. It was a huge cock-up," said one BBC insider.

Cameron was so desperate to please he even started to act like he was part of Steve Wright's posse:

Cameron read out a number of text messages from listeners in the "listener breaking news" section of the show, which included "I let my new chickens out this morning" and "On my way to pick up my new Mini".

Mini is a German company, Prime Minister. Remember, Thatcher flogged off most of our car industry to the private sector, Dave?

Perhaps it wouldn't have been such a disaster if Chris Evans had been anything other than a fawning patsy:

Evans, who introduced Cameron as the "prime minister of Great Britain, the ultimate Team GB", read out the newspaper headlines and asked Cameron: "They've not been bad headlines over the last 13 days, have they prime minister?"